THE BOTTLE AS HERO said. He told them that the New Age one was also possible, if they could hoist it upmarket. They left his office, and he shook his head sadly. Later that afternoon, the art director and the copywriter stopped me in a corridor and asked me not to pub- lish their names. T HE creative teams showed up early the next morning for a final review before the client arrived. Arlow didn't like the sketch of a Mar- tini glass under crysta] that accompa- nied the line "Consider the intimida- tion factor" in the third team's "Flaw- less" campaign. "It always seemed to me that the woman dressed to the nines was an intimidating factor," he said. "This with just the glass doesn't say intimida- . " tion to me. Karetzky retrieved the earlier artwork for Arlow to present with the copy. When the first team appeared with the completed "Nothing Comes Close" comps, Arlow suggested a typeface change but was otherwise delighted. He loved the informative body copy. "The whole thing I was afraid of with this con- cept was that it would be dry and factual and boring," he said. 'We've made it fun and a game." Mennillo took the comps away to mount them on black board for the presentation. After everyone had left, Arlow said to me, pointing to the "Flawless" sketch, "I don't want to produce that. I'll show it to him to show the transition. For me, crystal is a dead end. It doesn't have the same kind of legs from ad d " to a . Roux, accompanied by Capria, the director of market- ing services, arrived at ten- thirty. Arlow first showed them some new artwork in the "Free- dom of Vodka" campaign. Then, as a warmup for the Cristall presentation, he remi- nisced about the spurious gold ring and waxed poetic about the technical process that sets Cristall apart. "You know where we are to- day, Tuesday?" Roux inter- rupted "I need a slide of fin- ished stuffbv Friday." "You know, I think I'm go- ing to go to the finish," Arlow said. Instead of opening as he had planned, with a review of everything he had rejected, he presented the reasoning behind his favorite campaign. 'We take this technical information so that people when they read the ad will know it's magical, it's on a pedestal," he said. "There's a vodka around that a lot of people are drinking Can we change their minds?" "Can we see the ads";)" Roux said, laughing but irritated. "I'm falling as- leep here." 'When we filter it this way, no other vodka can even come close," Arlow said. "So how can we say that and make a charming, interesting presentation? The pictures I'm going to show you are mockups." He unveiled the comp of sol- diers guarding a bottle on top of Lenin's tomb. "Nothing comes close-because nothing comes close in taste and noth- ing can get close to its protection. And this ad copy should be the same for ev- ery single ad, until everybody gets the message." He read Korchek's body copy on the triple-filtration process. 'Who is going to read that?" Roux asked. "Everybody," Arlow said "The thing we did wrong from the beginning was not explain it. I think people will read it. They'll read ads about Mercedes, they'll read ads about sneakers." "But those are ads that are not bever- age alcohol," Capria said. His voice, loud 71 and nasal, pierced the air like a car alarm. "You know why there's no copy in beverage alcohol?" Arlow said. "It's all puffery. This isn't puffery. This is our gold ring." "The knowledge of the brand is very small," Roux said. 'What are you doing to increase awareness?" In traditional ad- vertising thinking, the way to increase awareness is to run a picture of the prod- uct as large as possible. Unfortunately, in the next comp that Arlow presented, the two Dobermans loomed over the bottle. "Don't use animals with Cristall," Capria wailed. "It's not the image." "That's the Doberman that killed the governor of Bermuda," Roux said, chuckling. "Don't laugh," Arlow beseeched the client. "Please don't laugh." He showed the rough sketches of a hedge maze and a laser protection device. "I like these two better," Roux said of the sketches. "I know what you are trying to do. These send you a mes- sage." He pointed to the Dobermans comp and issued an uncharacteristically straight-forward directive. "Instead of having the dogs, you have two Rus- sian guards" "That's this one," Arlow said, point- ing to the photograph of Lenin's tomb, which had two small guards pacing in front of it. "No, that is this one," Roux retorted, pointing obstinately to the large Dober- J THINI( I r WE. CAN TONE DDWN THE 5A-DUM) SA-DUM) lr'S BETTER. IJ ,